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Negotiating Union. South Africa’s National Union of Mineworkers and the end of the Post-Apartheid Consensus
No full textBased on a case study of South Africa’s largest trade union – the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM), this dissertation puts the current mining crisis in historical perspective. Beyond mining, it proposes keys to understand South Africa’s “negotiated” transformation from apartheid to democracy. It concludes that this country currently experiences what one can call the “end of the post-apartheid consensus;” a moment in which shared elitist conceptions of political and socioeconomic change developed during South Africa’s 1990s transition are starting to be decisively challenged.
Departing from the NUM’s early years, in apartheid’s last decade, it analyses the union’s trajectory as a mineworkers’ organisation after the end of white minority rule. Questioning NUM representations, in traditional struggle iconography, as a militant and revolutionary organisation, it argues that this union was also historically developed into a disciplined union, structured by and around strong core leadership. In other words, the main questions raised here are: how are we to understand, in time, tensions between militancy on the one hand, and organisation on the other hand? How are we to account in non-linear terms for the build up to the 2012 Marikana strike and massacre, in a democratic context in which labour relations had supposedly become less adversarial and more workers friendly? What, in the NUM’s organisational ethos, can help us understand what happened, not as if Marikana was the expression of fundamental and untenable contradictions – class betrayal by another name, but as the result of the sometimes unintended consequences of a nevertheless conscious and deliberate process aimed at organisation building and development?
The main hypothesis that is put to work here is that NUM founders strategically built a centralised and efficient organisation, in order to survive in the mines’ repressive environment. This, in turn, generated tensions, which were to remain, between the grassroots and the top of the organisation. In order to fulfil its organisational goals, the union also crucially invested in leadership development, at the expense of membership development. While claiming to be a socialist union that produced professional organisers and revolutionaries, the NUM nevertheless gave birth to professional negotiators who were more inclined towards negotiation than conflict. If the NUM achieved tremendous gains for workers through collective bargaining, the 2012 strikes and their aftermath have shown that mineworkers still aspire to militancy at the grassroots, and that they are ready to fight in order to “transform” the mining industry. This implies that the workers’ bread and butter demands are also rooted in more structural claims, which have gradually brought the “post-apartheid consensus,” which until 2012 prevailed as a shared narrative of how mining was to be democratised, into question.La Sapienza Università di Roma, Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, Institut des mondes africaines (Paris), French Institute of South Africa, Università Italo Frances
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Get PDFThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
« La jeune Afrique du Sud en ballottage : mouvements étudiants et amorces d’une alternance politique »
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The African National Congress Youth League after apartheid: political consciousness, filiation, involvement and organisation among the "post-young lions" generation in South Africa"
No full textFrom the Freedom Charter to the Mining Charter: transforming the gold industry for the benefit of "the people as a whole" in post-apartheid South Africa?
No full text« La jeune Afrique du Sud en ballottage : mouvements étudiants et amorces d’une alternance politique »
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« L'échec de l'institutionnalisation des conflits du travail dans les mines d'Afrique du Sud »
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Inheritance and invention: the case of the African National Congress Youth League after apartheid
No full text“Changing leadership representations and loss of union authority in South Africa’s mineworkers strikes"
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